


not made to be broken

by alotofthingsdifferent



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: M/M, Soulmates, soul bonds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-27
Updated: 2017-05-27
Packaged: 2018-10-30 04:29:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10869135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alotofthingsdifferent/pseuds/alotofthingsdifferent
Summary: Joey gets traded, and Seth Jones walks into their locker room, and the floor tilts ominously beneath Brandon’s feet.His eyes meet Seth’s for a split second, and then everything goes black.In hindsight, he probably should have known.





	not made to be broken

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shihadchick](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shihadchick/gifts).



Brandon can’t remember the last time he felt _normal._

Well, he can, but thinking about the hows and whys of his situation makes his stomach churn anxiously. Considering that he’s already in a constant state of achiness, he chooses not to add to it by remembering the hit he’d taken at center ice two months ago, the way he’d landed with a sickening thud right in the middle of Jackets logo. His shoulder had taken the brunt of it, but his head still spun, making him nauseous and woozy, and when he’d rolled onto his back and opened his eyes, Seth Jones was standing over him, his jaw a little slack. 

Brandon had scowled at him and pushed himself to his feet, waving off the help of his teammates as he made his way back to the bench. “I’m fine,” he snapped, even though something ached deep in his bones when he dropped down next to Fligs. 

So yeah, he hasn’t felt _normal_ for a while, but it’s not a concussion, the trainers say, and nothing’s broken. He’s not _sick_ , he’s just -- he feels weird, is all. Off. There’s an odd, lingering sense of deja vu, something about the ache that’s familiar, but he can’t put his finger on it. It’s impossible to explain, so he’s stopped trying. He tells anyone who asks -- himself included -- that he’s fine. 

Everything’s fine.

And then Joey gets traded, and Seth Jones walks into the locker room, and the floor tilts ominously beneath Brandon’s feet. 

His eyes meet Seth’s for a split second, and then everything goes black.

In hindsight, he probably should have known.

**

”Hey,” Leds said, knocking his shoulder into Brandon’s. “You good?”

“Huh?” Brandon replied, distracted. By what, he wasn’t sure. “Yeah, I’m --” He trailed off when Seth Jones skated by, his face split by a wide smile aimed towards the opposite end of the ice. Jones looked over his shoulder just as he passed Brandon, his eyes dark when they met Brandon’s gaze, and Brandon shuddered, felt a spark of heat jolt down his spine. 

“Saader?” Leds said, and Brandon blinked, shaking his head a little. Nick gave him a strange look, his eyebrows raised, and Brandon forced a laugh, poking Nick’s shin with the blade of his stick.

“You kept me up too late last night,” he said with a wink, and when Nick’s cheeks flushed behind his beard, Brandon knew he’d successfully distracted Nick from whatever the hell just happened there.  
“Whatever,” Nick mumbled, trying to hide his smile. “You were the one who wanted to go round two.”

“Didn’t hear you complaining,” Brandon leaned in and said, and they both jumped when Coach blew the whistle, pointing a finger at the two of them. “Back to work,” Brandon said, and pushed off on his skates, grinning at Nick over his shoulder.

Jones was at the other end of the rink, skating lazy circles around the net. 

Brandon ignored the strange feeling coursing through his veins and snagged a puck.

**

“I’m fine,” he snaps when he comes to, pushing himself to standing from where he’d slumped into Dubi, Dubi’s arms hooked under his armpits to hold him up. The sound of someone’s racing heartbeat -- Seth’s, he thinks bitterly -- thrums loudly in Brandon’s ears, and he pinches the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath in, letting it out slowly. He wonders if Seth knows, if Seth can feel it too -- the sudden, intense bond between them, unexpected and not altogether welcome. 

“Saader, you just --” Fligs starts, but Brandon cuts him off with a look, gritting his teeth and repeating himself.

“I’m _fine_.” Everyone in the locker room is looking at him, uncertainty written on each of their faces, but Brandon just turns back to his stall and grabs his helmet, steeling himself as he pushes past Jones on his way out of the locker room. His breath catches in his throat when their shoulders touch, and he has to lean against the wall when the door closes behind him to stop the wobbling in his legs. 

He knows what’s going on. Even as the ache in his bones eases -- surely because of Jones’ proximity -- he knows he’s fighting the connection with everything he has, willing it to go away, to break somehow. It’s why his knees are shaking, why his hands are sweating in his gloves. 

Maybe, he thinks as he makes his way to the ice, the beating of Jones’ heart still loud in his ears, maybe if he just pretends this isn’t happening, it won’t. 

**

It was supposed to be Nick.

All the signs pointed to it being Nick, from the instant connection they had to the way they clicked on the ice. Everything between them was intense and all-consuming; they couldn’t get enough of one another. Brandon would lay awake sometimes, watching Nick sleep, and wonder how he got so lucky. 

Neither of them worried about their lack of an obvious bond, not at first, anyway. It didn’t matter much to them that they hadn’t had some earth shattering, eye-opening moment yet. They didn’t need a sign to tell them what they already knew. 

So when Nick called him in late summer, a couple months before the season started, Brandon wasn’t expecting the first words out of his mouth to be, “I bonded.”

**

He’s the first one out of the room after practice, his bag slung over his shoulder and his eyes focused on the door -- his escape. He can feels Jones’ eyes on him, and he fights the urge to shiver, just grips the strap of his bag tighter and hurries out, needing to put some space between them. 

He’s halfway home when he begins to regret it, feels the familiar ache return to his bones, maybe worse now than it was before, and he knows, he _knows_ it’s just the bond talking, but he considers turning back and getting into Jones’ space, just so he can feel normal again.

And fuck, is this how it’s going to be? He won’t feel _normal_ unless he’s around Jones? 

He knows it doesn’t have to be this way. There are ways to get rid of it, procedures that can be done to sever the bond, but it’s risky, and he knows more than one person that’s gone through a bond-breaking and were never the same after, not really. (His brother George agreed to a bond-break with a girl he’d bonded with in college. Since then, Brandon always notices the sad, far-away look in George’s eyes that never seems to go away.)

He wants to call Nick -- they’re still friends, after all, they have too much history between them to just end their relationship because one of them bonded. _Both of us now_ , Brandon thinks, and maybe that’s the hardest part. Knowing that Nick really, truly isn’t his soulmate, that his bond with Anthony wasn’t just a fluke that would fade out like a dying ember, the universe somehow realizing that it had been wrong all along. 

Instead, he heats up a leftover chicken breast and eats it sitting cross-legged on the couch, aimlessly flipping through channels on the TV. He settles on a documentary about space travel and tries not to think about Nick.

**

“We’re not -- I mean, it’s not like that,” Nick stuttered, sounding far less miserable than Brandon would like. “We’re just, y’know.”

“Friends,” Brandon filled in, and Nick made a sound of agreement on the other end of the line.  
“Friends,” he repeated, but he didn’t sound very convincing. 

“So then we can still…” Brandon trailed off, not even sure how to put it. Fuck? Kiss? Say “I love you”?

“Brandon,” Nick said, a quiet plea that made Brandon’s heart sink. “We’re just friends, yeah, but--”

“But it could be more.”

Nick was silent on the other end of the line. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry, Brandon, I thought for sure --”

“Yeah,” Brandon said, swallowing around the swell of emotion in his throat. “I know. Me too.”

**

Sleep didn’t come easy. He tossed and turned, stared at the ceiling, willed his brain to stop conjuring images of Seth on the ice, Seth in the locker room, Seth at all.

But then, Brandon started seeing things that he knew his own brain wasn’t producing. The images were blurry at first, the shadow of two figures in an embrace. The first thing Brandon figured out was that they were kissing. The second thing was that one of them was Seth.

Image after image rolled like a slideshow in his mind, Seth and Filip Forsberg laughing, kissing, holding hands. Declarations of love, discussions of even if they didn’t bond, their love would be the same. 

And then the mood changed, and Brandon saw Seth in a hotel room with red-rimmed eyes, Forsberg putting a hand on his shoulder and whispering, “I’m sorry.”

He opened his eyes with a gasp, his heart racing. 

And then he was out the door. 

**

“You don’t want it either,” is the first thing Brandon says when Seth opens the door. It’s weird, being here in Joey’s old apartment building, someone else living in his apartment, even weirder to see some of Seth’s things scattered about. The picture of Joey and Cam that used to hang underneath a Jackets magnet on the fridge is gone, replaced by a photo of a really cute Husky pup, and there aren’t eleven pairs of shoes scattered by the front door. Just two, sitting neatly next to one another. 

 

“Hello, Brandon, nice to see you too,” Seth says, closing the door and following Brandon into the apartment. “I’d tell you to make yourself at home, but I feel like you already have.”

“Were you in love with him?” Brandon doesn’t mean to say it -- or he _does_ , he just didn’t mean to say it so bluntly and so suddenly He’d meant for them to have a conversation first, but --

“Yeah,” Seth says, all matter-of-fact, and when their eyes lock, the relief that Brandon feels is palpable. 

“Fuck,” he breathes, collapsing dramatically onto Joey’s (now Seth’s) couch. “I can’t even believe -- have you been feeling as shitty as I have since that hit?”

Seth chuckles softly, and Brandon feels it in his chest, vibrating all the way down to his toes. “I think I knew before that, actually.” He scratches the back of his neck and sits down, careful to keep enough space between them.

Brandon appreciates it.

“Olympic training camp,” Brandon says softly, and it’s like an epiphany on his tongue. “I thought I was just. I don’t know. I thought it was nerves, or something. But it was --”

“The start,” Seth says simply, and Brandon blows out a breath and sinks back into the cushions. He feels warm all over, content and comfortable, and that awful, confusing ache he’s been feeling for the past few months has been replaced by a pleasant tingle just beneath the surface of his skin.

“Do you feel that?” Brandon whispers, afraid to look at Seth, but afraid not to.

“Yeah,” Seth says, and out of the corner of his eye, Brandon sees him wringing his hands, and then, after a pause, “I was just so sure it was him, y’know?” He looks at the floor, his jaw clenched, and Brandon feels the pain in Seth’s heart like it’s his own.

“I know,” Brandon replies, and before he can stop himself, remind himself that he came here to put a stop to this, he puts his hand on Seth’s knee to stop it from jiggling. A spark of blue light flashes between them, just beneath Brandon’s palm, and they both gasp, awed, watching the light wind its way around Brandon’s wrist, snaking down Seth’s leg to wrap around his ankle. It holds there for long moments, sparkling against their skin, before it fades into near nothing, just the shadow of a thread holding them together. 

“Wow,” is all Brandon can manage, and he suddenly can’t imagine breaking his bond with Seth. It was true, what everyone was always saying. Bonds were never made to be broken. The universe was never wrong. 

“So we’re doing this?” Seth asks, and when Brandon finally looks at him, all, he can think is _this is it_.

“Yeah,” Brandon says, turning his hand palm-up on Seth’s knee. Seth takes the hint and twines their fingers together, and Brandon’s whole body sings. “We’re doing this.”

**

“So I bonded,” Brandon says, before Nick can even get out a hello. “With Seth. Jones.”

“B,” Nick says, and Brandon can hear the quiet relief in his voice. “It’s -- you know I’ll always love you, right? But isn’t it just --”

“Yeah,” Brandon interrupts, glancing at Seth sleeping next to him, the steady rise and fall of his chest timed perfectly with Brandon’s own. “It is.”


End file.
